Anthropic

PDF — Documentation skill for Claude Code

Documentation official Intermediate

Extract text, create PDFs, merge/split documents, and handle forms.

How to install PDF

Installs to ~/.claude/skills/pdf/

Terminal

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/skills /tmp/skills \
  && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills \
  && cp -r /tmp/skills/skills/pdf ~/.claude/skills/pdf

Clones the whole repository, because a skill folder can carry scripts and resources beside its SKILL.md.

What PDF does

Comprehensive PDF manipulation toolkit covering text/table extraction, creating new PDFs, combining/merging, splitting, rotating pages, adding watermarks, filling forms, encrypting/decrypting, extracting images, and OCR on scanned PDFs.

The README for anthropics/skills is shared by 21 entries and is shown on algorithmic-art.

When Claude uses PDF

Trigger

When user wants to do anything with PDF files

Tools it reaches for:

BashWriteRead

Alternatives in Documentation

Ars Format Convert — ARS academic-paper format-convert mode — convert to LaTeX / DOCX / PDF / Markdown 4.5k ★
99 Release — MoAI-ADK production release via Enhanced GitHub Flow (CLAUDE.local.md §18) 991 ★
Rainman Translate Book — English 中文 Claude Code Skill，使用并行 subagent 将整本书（PDF/DOCX/EPUB）翻译成任意语言 489 ★